Bombs saved lives
in war with Japan

Japanese atrocities were just as horrible as German atrocities. For instance, Unit 731 performed vivisections on living victims, Chinese and American prisoners, injecting some with deadly microbes.

The Bataan Death March was forced on Americans who surrendered Bataan, a march of 60 miles in the tropical heat with no food or water, constantly beaten by Japanese guards.

Records show 25 percent of American POWs held by the Japanese were killed by starvation, withholding of medical care, beheading, bayoneting, overwork or a rifle butt to the head.

Many were shipped to Japan and Formosa (Taiwan), jammed in the holds of "Hell Ships" to work and die in the mines. (Allied POWs held by the Germans suffered a much lower death toll).

The Rape of Nanking was so terrible -- 200,000 Chinese people brutally killed by the Imperial Japanese Army -- that even the German ambassador asked Adolph Hitler to persuade Japan to put a stop to it.

All these Japanese atrocities and more are well documented in such books as "The Rape of Nanking," by Iris Chang, "Ghost Soldiers," by Hampton Sides and "Prisoners of the Japanese," by Gavan Daws.

In August 1945, I was an artilleryman in the 40th Infantry Division on the Philippine island of Panay, preparing for the invasion of the Japanese home islands. Only the atomic bomb spared us from what would have been a long, bloody battle.

I knew then, as I know now, that I would not survive, along with 100,000 other American soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen. So don't tell us the bombs were not necessary. We know they were.